Overground Railroad: The Green Book and the Roots of Black Travel in America

Overground Railroad: The Green Book and the Roots of Black Travel in America by Candacy Taylor was a remarkable book about the travel guide known as the Green Book. This guide, in print from 1936 to 1967, was created to inform black travellers of hotels, resorts, restaurants, nightclubs and other amenities and attractions that did not discriminate. In the time of segregation, black travellers would not have known everyplace where it was safe to visit, or which places were in fact sundown towns should they arrive and need accommodation at night. Founded by Victor Hugo Green, his guide was essential reading in the time of Jim Crow. He even printed “Carry your Green Book with you–You may need it.” on the front cover for many years.

Taylor travelled through history from the year of the first Green Book in 1936, covering the postwar years to the burgeoning black power movement. She also touched on themes, such as train travel, music venues, Route 66, and women travellers.

Desegregation opened up the possibilities for black travellers to visit new places and they were not limited to the finite lists within the Green Book. Unfortunately the business owners who had previously seen their patronage suffered as their customer base disappeared. The sense of black community which one encountered while on vacation vanished as black travellers enjoyed the integrated experience (which, truth be told, was still wrought with discrimination). One community activist put it succinctly: “We got what we wanted, but we lost what we had.”

Taylor produced a weighty and attractive work full of photographs showing every cover of every Green Book ever published, as well as many pages showing the contents within. She travelled all over the country to locate places listed in the guide and photographed how they look today. Taylor told a story in an engaging format that placed the reader in the car with the traveller. Even the pages double-spread with solid text were rapid reads. The print was easy on the eyes. Overall the book felt and looked like a luxurious piece of art as it was so beautifully laid out.

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100 Things We’ve Lost to the Internet

 

100 Things We’ve Lost to the Internet by Pamela Paul is a curious book of short chapters dealing with all the concrete and intangible things humankind has supposedly lost in the last twenty, or even in the last ten, years. I call this book “curious” because in spite of Paul’s sentimental mourning over the loss of photo albums and family gatherings around the dinner table where every member is not nose-deep into his cellphone, it seems to me that she could have many of these things back if she only put her damn phone away. Being tethered to her smartphone is not a justifiable reason to sound the death knell of Scrabble tiles, penmanship and proper spelling. She misses handwritten letters, birthday cards and maps, as well as honorable human behaviours such as patience, civility and asking politely. I can only wonder if Paul continues to write letters or send birthday cards herself. If she misses them so much, she has the power to do something about it. I got the feeling that she was feigning a counterfeit sense of regret, and, if she was given a pen and a fancy piece of stationery, as well as a free postage stamp, she couldn’t be bothered to compose a letter to someone. Birthday cards are another matter, as I believe Paul still prefers to send the real thing:

“Now, birthday greetings may instead arrive in the form of emails, posts, texts, and, perhaps worst of all, e-cards, which either slip into spam where they belong or land in unison on the morning of the big day because they are automated. However they get there, nobody wants them. Really, nobody. Ready-made and free for anyone who signs up and signs away their data (and yours!), the e-card says nobody could be bothered making or buying a card of their own. There is nothing fun about the e-card, which forces you to click through several slow-to-load screens before you arrive at anything resembling a personal message. It leaves no recipient feeling seen or tended to. It feels crappy on your birthday, indifferent on Valentine’s Day, brutal on Mother’s Day.”

The author also wrote chapters on experiences or professions that the Internet has eliminated, such as window shopping, blind dates, eye contact, and receptionists. No one goes on a true blind date anymore, not when one can check out the other’s presence on social media. Everyone’s attention is focussed on his smartphone or laptop and no one looks at you when speaking. I mourn eye contact too.

Yet ownership of a smartphone now obligates one into doing all kinds of activities and never leaves one with the option to opt out. For example, Paul can never claim to have missed a call, not when her cellphone will take a message for her. She will never again feel the panic of being lost, not when her GPS and Google Maps can point her in the right direction (and not feeling lost is a good thing). And she never has to memorize anyone’s phone number–or memorize anything, for that matter–not when her phone has all her numbers stored in a personal contact list. Take it from journalist Euna Lee, who was imprisoned in North Korea, and commit all of your most important phone numbers to memory. You might need to call someone if somehow you weren’t attached to your phone.

While I do use the Internet every day, I do not own a cellphone, so my perspective is not from someone with a hunched back and sore neck, so when you call me (and if I answer) I am at home. I approached this book thus from a different perspective as my attention span (number 63 on her list) is not lost and is still sharp, thank-you very much.

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Driven: The Secret Lives of Taxi Drivers

Driven: The Secret Lives of Taxi Drivers by Marcello Di Cintio is a compilation of fourteen stories from all across Canada. Di Cintio concentrated on the subjects outside of the confines of their cabs and thus spared us the seedy stories that one might have expected to find in the cars’ back seats. We learned what brought each man–and a few women–to find his or her career as a cab driver. Some fled unstable or war-torn countries while others needed to make a living while waiting for the wheels of bureaucracy to turn. The chapters that worked best were the shorter ones, as I found the author’s lengthier cabbie profiles to be boring to the point where I no longer cared who he was writing about.

The overwhelming number of cab drivers are recent immigrants. They have to put up with all kinds of passengers, and being in a cab seems to give some of them licence to be openly racist. I never realized how much verbal abuse cab drivers face in order to earn a living. Most of them have learned to ignore it. Di Cintio then exposed a chilling fact:

“A 2012 Statistics Canada report revealed that taxi drivers are murdered on the job at a higher rate than workers of any other legal profession. Even police officers are killed less often.”

On the lighter side of cab driving, I chuckled as each driver told the author his immigrant story because:

“Almost every taxi driver I met who had come from somewhere else, especially from tropical climes, told a similar story of landing during the cold dead of winter. No one ever seems to arrive in Canada in the summer, as if there were an official government policy to cruelly haze new Canadians with weather.”

The best chapter was about the women of Ikwe, a group of Winnipeg women drivers who serve a female clientele. After feeling the abuse and discrimination from male drivers, Winnipeg women had had enough. Ikwe, an Ojibwe word meaning woman, is their non-profit taxi service. I also enjoyed the chapter on Rawi Hage, a driver turned award-winning author.

Di Cintio included a pandemic postscript, to document how COVID decimated the taxi industry. Drivers lost customers and had to work longer shifts to earn the same each day. Cabs were outfitted with barriers and some drivers no longer felt safe handling their passengers’ baggage.

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Seven Kinds of People You Find in Bookshops

 

Seven Kinds of People You Find in Bookshops by Shaun Bythell was a small book of 120 pages, wherein Bythell, the owner of a Scottish second-hand bookstore, takes a humorous look at those who patronize his store. He divided his customers into seven types (and subtypes within each chapter): Expert; Young Family; Occultist; Loiterer; Bearded Pensioner; The Not-So-Silent Traveller; and Family Historian. He himself was not immune to criticism as his final chapter was all about the various kinds of bookstore staff.

For such a short book I had numerous laugh-out-loud moments, as I recognized many such customers in my own book-buying trips. I couldn’t place myself into any of his categories, even among the most favorable type, the “perfect customer”, which he tagged on at the very end in a post-script chapter. I am the kind of customer who never haggles over prices which is in keeping with my preference to avoid dealing with any staff while I’m shopping. I like to browse and wander and do not need direction, unless I am in a hurry and don’t have the luxury of spending hours in the store. These are rare bookstore moments, as I usually allow myself plenty of time to find what I’m looking for. However if my time is limited I will ask the first staff person I see to point the way to foreign languages or local history and I will be off like a dart.

I loved the story about book-loving children, which Bythell had seen plenty of times where parents have a hard time dragging their kids out of the store. That’s exactly the way I reacted whenever I had to leave a bookstore–and often still do. My “give me five more minutes, I promise” is Craigspeak for needing an additional half hour.

In a story within the chapter on Bearded Pensioners, I liked the author’s imagery in describing the wardrobe of the “female of this species”:

“It’s a sort of green tartan waistcoat, made from the hardiest of tweed. It looks like the sort of thing that’s tough enough to drag through a hedge backwards without damaging a single stitch.”

Among the not-so-silent travellers are customers who whistle, hum or fart. What could be more annoying than hearing a whistler broadcast some tuneless pop song/TV theme song mishmash throughout the entire store?

I like to go hunting when I shop. Whether I’m looking for second-hand books or, back in the 1990’s when I would look for Christmas music in Sam the Record Man’s enormous holiday section, it paid to have the patience to dig through stacks of books or CD’s. I always found one-of-a-kind gems that had been overlooked. Like the customers below, our perseverance rewarded us with cheap loot:

“They’re clearly married, because the moment they enter the shop they split up and avoid one another for at least an hour while they ferret away, but when they come to the counter they will each have found at least five books in the shop which have been there since 1970, and which nobody has bothered to change the price of since then. These are books which ought to be £20 each, but which–by virtue of idleness on my part, combined with the fact that we have 100,000 books in the shop–have remained priced at £1 each. I have no idea how they hunt them out, but they do so with such determination–like pigs hunting for truffles every time they visit–that I feel that I should probably offer them each a job.”

Bythell ranks fiction collectors, railway collectors, sci-fi fans and those who are open to good advice as his best kind of customers. Those, as well as anyone who doesn’t haggle over his prices are tops in his book.

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Hockey Card Stories

 

Hockey Card Stories is the third book I have read by Ken Reid, following One Night Only: Conversations with the NHL’s One-Game Wonders and One to Remember: Stories from 39 Members of the NHL’s One Goal Club. I found this one to be the funniest of the bunch, and as a hockey card collector from the seventies I surely recognized all the cards he profiled from that period. Since my collection is within easy reach, and not buried in a box in the garage or unfortunately thrown out by an overzealous tidier of a mother, I could reach in and take a look at these cards myself. Reid provided life-size shots of the front and back of each card he talked about.

Before I saw any hockey cards, though, when I opened the cover my eyes were greeted by a double-sided page of pink. I have to admit that it took me a few seconds to figure out what this page was (was it a misprint or ink error?) and then it dawned on me: it was a piece of dusty hard hockey card gum. Priceless!

Reid divided his stories into eleven chapters based on card theme, such as Goalies, Rookies, Hall of Famers and WHA cards, but by far the most amusing chapters dealt with topics such as Strike a Pose (for the best card posers), Making it Look Mean (for the meanest faces ever to adorn a card) and my favourites, Airbrush and Error Cards. Unquestionably the worst cut-and-paste job in hockey card history has to go to the 1971-72 O-Pee-Chee for Rogie Vachon. He had just been traded from the Montreal Canadiens to the Los Angeles Kings and a card was hurriedly pieced together to create this:

That is Rogie’s head but definitely not his body. According to Reid, everything from the neck down belongs to Ross Lonsberry.

In the chapter on Colorado Rockies player Jack Valiquette, Reid wrote:

“Confession: I love the Colorado Rockies uniform…I loved pulling out the odd Rockies card from a wax pack. I loved the way they looked: the blue, red, gold and white just worked for me.”

I have to agree with him. In the 1977-78 O-Pee-Chee series, the team logo card, below, was one of my favourites:

Reid has written a second volume of hockey card stories and I will have to request it via interloan.

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Sovietistan: Travels in Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan

Sovietistan: Travels in Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan by Erika Fatland (translated by Kari Dickson) looked as if it was going to be a daunting brick of a book of 477 pages, but it surprised me by being an alarmingly rapid read. Fatland wrote it in her native Norwegian and Dickson produced such an excellent translation that, barring only a couple turns of phrase a native English speaker would never say, it was difficult to tell that this book wasn’t originally written in English. For 477 pages, that’s pretty good.

I was hooked as I read about Fatland’s treks through the five former Soviet republics of Central Asia in the early 2010’s. She made the trip on her own yet with obligatory guides and drivers where necessary. Turkmenistan, covered in the first chapter, is the most bizarre of the Asian republics in its paranoia and personality cult of a regime. A comparison to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea would be accurate in that Fatland was never let out of sight (or when she thought she was, she knew someone was watching or listening). The only part where the book d-r-a-g-g-e-d was the section entitled The Great Game within the chapter on Tajikistan where Fatland spent far too long outlining the failed attempts to conquer Central Asia, most recently by the British and Soviets. I was lulled to sleep at times, but the history of the Wakhan Corridor revived me. Aside from those pages, she wrote with a degree of intellectual curiosity that was infectious. Unlike some travel storytellers, Fatland didn’t look down on the people or places she visited. She didn’t use cultural differences as a way to ridicule those that were different from her. Her language skills worked to her advantage, as she attempted to speak to the people she met in their native tongue, falling on Russian as a lingua franca.

Among her many adventures within each republic, my favourites were travelling down the empty multi-lane highway in downtown Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, among the white marble buildings and statues of its late dictator. I also enjoyed her trek across the salty bed of the former Aral Sea. She talked to Kyrgyz women who were kidnapped into marriage, who, surprisingly, didn’t mind being abducted. That section had the best of all subchapter titles: “Don’t Cry, You are My Wife Now”. The history of cotton production in Uzbekistan, and the evaporation of the Aral Sea there to divert its water for irrigation, was also of great interest.

Since the book had no index it was difficult to relocate passages (such as that about the Wakhan Corridor) and although the pagination left roughly 95 pages to each republic it was still no easy task to find things, in spite of the subchapter titles. I always keep notes when I read and I realized how important it was to do so without an index. I found a few editing gaffes that should be corrected by the next printing, such as the confusion of the years on p. 46. Fatland wrote that Saparmurat Niyazov was born on February 19, 1949, yet in the very next sentence stated that his father died during the Second World War, and in the sentence after that she wrote that his mother died in an earthquake in 1948. So was Niyazov born after both his parents had died? The imprint I read was meant for a British audience as British spellings such as tyre were used, so I suppose the UK indecisiveness over the metric versus imperial systems allowed the author to alternate between kilometres and miles. And in discussing the sheer size of Russia and Kazakhstan, she erred in stating “The Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic, today’s Kazakhstan, accounted for twelve per cent of the total area of the Soviet Union, which was a staggering 22,402,200 square metres.” (emphasis mine). Perhaps this was a translator error or a slip of the printer. I’d like to see what the original Norwegian text said.

I thoroughly enjoyed Sovietistan, and the author’s bibliography has led me to request two books via interloan.

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Outrageous Misfits: Female Impersonator Craig Russell and His Wife, Lori Russell Eadie

 

Outrageous Misfits: Female Impersonator Craig Russell and His Wife, Lori Russell Eadie by Brian Bradley came out in 2020. It was a hefty and substantial biography of the couple, beautifully laid out with text and photos. I grew up knowing who Russell was and I own the DVD of his most famous film, outrageous! Despite being gay Craig married Lori in 1982. Lori herself didn’t like labels yet her marriage surprised many people because they all thought that she was a lesbian. Bradley used extensive resources–just look at the lengthy bibliography and list of source material at the end of the book–including Lori’s own journals. He had an insight into the psychological makeup of two needy people who were desperate to be loved.

Craig was an overweight effeminate boy who from an early age liked to dress up in women’s clothing and accessories. His own grandmother recognized this and gave him earrings when he was five. Craig drowned his sorrows from teasing and low self-esteem in his idols, famous women stars and singers, and mastered the art of impersonation. He copied every subtle mannerism, twitch and turn to make you feel that you were actually watching Judy Garland, Tallulah Bankhead, Peggy Lee, Carol Channing or Bette Midler onstage. But no one impressed Craig more than Mae West. Craig eventually lived with West for a short time as her personal secretary, but was fired after the legendary actress discovered he had been taking liberties with her wardrobe.

Craig’s ability to transform into these women was uncanny: the generous photos show how he made himself look identical to West, Lee and Channing. Craig never lip-synched to their songs or dialogue. He was a true impressionist who copied their vocal delivery as well. He dreamt of stardom and achieved it. In the early seventies Craig was one of the first drag stars, however he preferred the terms female impersonator or female impressionist to drag queen. When onstage he was adored and the teasing and bullying stopped. Fans mobbed him backstage for photos and autographs. Bradley reported that Craig rarely left character offstage, even when at home. While this annoyed many people, it was easy to see why he did this. As long as he acted as one of his beloved ladies, the public adored him. He no longer had to deal with his insecurities. Therefore if he held a phone conversation with you while talking like Bette Davis, he felt you couldn’t hurt him:

“His impressions made him feel happy and they were a place to hide. There was no place to feel and talk about sensitivities and emotions if you were doing impressions of a movie star all the time.”

Bradley wrote two full biographies and treated both Craig and Lori with equal space. While Craig was certainly the star, the author didn’t frame Lori’s story always in the perspective of her husband. Lori grew up in an abusive household, tormented by a mother who rejected her. She found comfort in the performing arts, spending her time lost among the actors onstage in movies and live theatre. Lori developed an attraction to Craig, perhaps by seeing how the act of transformation can make an entire audience love you. She attended many of his performances and met him backstage. There was an immediate attraction of souls and the two were inseparable. Lori attended to Craig’s every need and eventually was hired as his dresser, in charge of his wardrobe, and accompanied him to shows.

Both Craig and Lori dealt with their own mental issues: Craig was manic-depressive and Lori was bipolar. In the late seventies they dealt with these issues not by psychotherapy and licenced prescriptions but through drinking and drugs. While no stranger to boozing and snorting coke, Craig’s decline started only after he made the film outrageous! Although he was lauded with awards and praise for his groundbreaking role as a female impersonator as the star of a movie, he felt that he was always under pressure to do something even more outrageous than the last. He had a reputation to live up to and the drinking and drugs helped move him along. He missed shows–sabotaged them even while onstage–and it wasn’t long before booking agents refused to deal with him. He was losing his star calibre. After a string of bad news stories and show disasters, the public needed some good news about Craig to start off 1982. Craig knew how to ring in the new year right: he announced that he was going to be married.

Outrageous publicity stunt it might have seemed, Craig and Lori did live together–at first–and then, without Lori, he left for a tour of Europe that lasted four and a half years. The constant strive to ever be more “outrageous” took its toll as Craig got into fights, ruined gigs and sunk deeper into the mire of booze and drugs. I had little to dislike about this book aside from Bradley’s overuse of the word outrageous, when he clearly didn’t have to. A film sequel, Too Outrageous! in 1987 and a return to the Imperial Room at the Royal York Hotel were not successes. The public and critics had grown tired of his act since he had not updated his impressions or repertoire. Reviewers felt he should be impersonating more modern entertainers. Craig’s comeback was a failure and he never recovered professionally as HIV was weakening him. Lori, devoted to Craig unconditionally, cared for him until the end.

Lori took the role of wife seriously and while she may seem to be an obsessed fan awarded with the ultimate prize, she always honoured Craig during his life and after his death fought–rightfully so–for her place in history as his widow. She herself died of melanoma in 2008 and is buried alongside Craig with his mother and stepfather.

Bradley wrote a biography of a remarkable couple that I could not put down. It chronicled the theatre and gay scenes in Toronto in the early seventies and also paid tribute to drag history. I would love to see this book turned into a movie.

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